Yay for working your whole life! Party like it's 1899!

- Jake

"Terraforming your own planet to make it uninhabitable hardly counts as epic win." - ThatBritGuy

Wikipedia appends this commentary:

P/E ratio - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Robert Shiller's plot of the S&P Composite Real Price-Earnings Ratio and Interest Rates (1871-2008), from Irrational Exuberance, 2d ed.^[1] In the preface to this edition, Shiller warns that "[t]he stock market has not come down to historical levels: the price-earnings ratio as I define it in this book is still, at this writing [2005], in the mid-20s, far higher than the historical average. ... People still place too much confidence in the markets and have too strong a belief that paying attention to the gyrations in their investments will someday make them rich, and so they do not make conservative preparations for possible bad outcomes."

But in this L-shaped near depression the last thing one would have to worry about would be stock markets as more severe issues would have to be addressed.

Is he talking about ice cream parties, the smell of new mown grass, the smiles of children on Christmas morning?

Tell me, tell me!  Is it fun?  Will I giggle like a school girl?  Tell Me!

I love the smell of roast chicken in the morning!

The Audit wants to know. What role did the press play in diffusing financial warnings in the years leading up to the current crisis?

We can't answer that question in its entirety--especially not in one post--but we can offer an example for your consideration: the press's supremely insufficient response to an important 1994 report by the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, warning about the dangers of derivatives--those largely unregulated financial instruments that have played such a central role in the current collapse.

European Tribune - Buy Stocks, They Said

there is at least a third probability of an L-shaped global near depression rather than the mere current severe U-shaped recession

1.

there is at least a third probability

How does he know this? Is his analysis really so good that he can quantify the likelihood? Or does he simply use a better brand of chicken entrails than I do?

2.

an L-shaped global near depression rather than the mere current severe U-shaped recession

Again: The shape of a downturn - U, V, L, whatever - is only apparent after the fact. How does he know today that right now we're in a U-downturn?

Granted, Roubini is a bright man with an excellent track record. His grasp of reality is obviously quite strong. And his call may well be correct.

But what bothers me is that he is couching the language of his prediction in the language of the stock shills: in the same kind of loose language that the Santellis, Cramers and other telenablers used to separate people and money.

Even serious people only know how to talk this way, it seems...

Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine - Patti Smith

Source: data, Yahoo! Finance; list, grainmarketresearch NB. The secret ingredient in Roubini's headline $50 EPS --priming price signals for trade-- is rationalizing inventory jobs cost-avoidance, dressed in "per-share profit" which is the new black, as in ink. I'd like to credit GOOG for popularizing this buy point, as Schmidt shareholders never demanded a dividend and are still happy to hold rather than dump.

UTX to Cut 11,6000 Jobs Worldwide | Bloomberg | 10 March 2009

The company now forecasts per-share profit of $4 to $4.50, including 30 cents to 40 cents for the new restructuring plan, net of anticipated one-time gains of $200 million to $350 million. In January the company repeated a per-share profit range for this year of $4.65 to $5.15, compared with $4.90 in 2008. United Technologies, which had sales of $58.7 billion last year, rose $2.31, or 6.2 percent, to $39.87 at 11:29 a.m. in New York Stock Exchange composite trading. The shares dropped 43 percent in the year through yesterday.

The world's youngest billionaires have lost nearly a third of their wealth, according to Forbes rich list.

The average net worth of billionaires 40 and under is $2.9bn (£2.1bn), down 30% from last year.

The youngest billionaire is Germany's car-racing bachelor Prince Albert von Thurn und Taxis, who is worth about $2.1bn at the age of 25.